Does Public Opinion Affect Political Speech?

Does public opinion affect political speech? Of particular interest is whether public opinion affects (i) what topics politicians address and (ii) what positions they endorse. We present evidence from Germany where the government was recently forced to declassify its public opinion research, allowing us to link the content of the research to subsequent speeches. Our causal identification strategy exploits the exogenous timing of the research's dissemination to cabinet members within a window of a few days. We find that exposure to public opinion research leads politicians to markedly change their speech. First, we show that linguistic similarity between political speech and public opinion research increases significantly after reports are passed on to the cabinet, suggesting that politicians change the topics they address. Second, we demonstrate that exposure to public opinion research alters politicians' substantive positions in the direction of majority opinion.     

It’s Not the Media,Stupid

It is commonly believed that the general public is heavily dependent on the media for its political news and views and that, as a consequence, the media exercise a strong influence over public opinion and behaviour. However, many millions in the Western world strongly believe things that are barely ever mentioned in the mainstream media, just as many millions also firmly reject or ignore some of the messages that are repeated incessantly by them. This confirms sixty years of experimental psychology research showing that most individuals are capable of preserving their beliefs, even in the face of overwhelming evidence, argument and logic to the contrary. Consistent with this, political science research finds little evidence of strong media influence on the party voting, political attitudes and election agendas of citizens. They have their own ways of gathering political information about the world around them, and they do not necessarily believe what they read in the papers, unless they are so inclined to start with. Consequently, media influences on mass opinion and behaviour are weaker than commonly assumed and, such as they are, their effects are more beneficial than harmful for democracy.     

How to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters: Disaggregating data from voting advice applications versus modeling survey responses

Valid and reliable estimates of the policy preferences of political parties' supporters are essential for the study of political representation. However, such estimates are not directly available from standard surveys of public opinion, which are typically representative by design only at the national level and rarely ask questions about public support for specific policies. In this article, we explore the possibility to use data from voting advice applications (VAA) to estimate the policy preferences of party supporters. To do that, first, we identify 10 questions on preferences towards issues of public policy that were asked around the same time and with similar wording in traditional surveys of public opinion and in VAAs fielded in Germany and in the Netherlands. Then we compare the VAA data disaggregated by political affiliation of the respondents to the survey data adjusted via multilevel regression modeling with poststratification (MRP). We find strong positive correlations between the estimates derived from both methods, especially after weighting the VAA data. Yet, point estimates are not always very close, and the match is sensitive to the treatment of neutral and ‘don't know’ answers. Overall, our results bode well for the validity of using VAA data in empirical research on political representation.     

Public images of political parties: A necessary evil?

The debate on citizen images of political parties is long standing, but recently it has taken on added importance as the evidence of party dealignment has spread across Western democracies. This article assembles an unprecedented cross-national array of public opinion data that describe current images of political parties. Sentiments are broadly negative, and this pessimism has deepened over the past generation. Then, we demonstrate how distrust of parties decreases voting turnout, contributes to the fragmentation of contemporary party systems and the electoral base of new protest parties, and stimulates broader cynicism towards government. Although political parties are the foundation of the system of representative democracy, fewer citizens today trust political parties, and this is reshaping the nature of democratic politics.     

The welfare state,migration, and voting rights

This paper proposes a political economic analysis of public opinion in European Union countries toward migrants from poor countries. By focusing on redistributive policy, the analysis sheds light on specific determinants of public opinion. The theoretical analysis, based on the median voter framework, shows that one of the key variables affecting public opinion is the voting rights of migrants. Where migrants do not have the right to vote, their presence negatively impacts the poorest natives. In countries where migrants enjoy voting rights, they are able to vote on redistributive policy; therefore, the impact of migration on natives’ welfare is fundamentally different. After the theoretical analysis, the paper proposes an empirical analysis of Europeans’ attitudes toward non-Western migrants in European Union countries. This empirical analysis confirms the decisive impact of migrants’ voting rights. It shows that, in EU countries, the more educated natives are significantly less favorable to migrants from poor countries when the latter have the right to vote.     

How Election Polls Shape Voting Behaviour

This article investigates how election information such as opinion polls can influence voting intention. The bandwagon effect claims that voters ‘float along’: a party experiencing increased support receives more support, and vice versa. Through a large national survey experiment, evidence is found of a bandwagon effect among Danish voters. When voters are exposed to a news story describing either an upwards or downwards movement for either a small or large party, they tend to move their voting intentions in the according direction. The effect is strongest in the positive direction – that is, when a party experiences increased support, more follows. Consistent effects are found across two different parties for a diverse national sample in a political context very different from earlier research on the bandwagon effects. Considering previous research and the fact that evidence is not found that suggests that the effect of polls vary across sociodemographic groups, the results imply that bandwagon behaviour is based not on social or political contingencies, such as media or political institution, but on fundamentals of political cognition.     

The Public Nature of Personal Opinion: The Impact of Collective Sentiment on Individual Appraisal

This paper examines the impact of the public on individual opinion. Employing survey-based experiments, I demonstrate public influence to be considerable, yet the magnitude, direction, and significance of effect depends critically on the target of public sentiment and the political predispositions of the perceiver. A theoretical model is developed to delineate and examine such effects, guiding the analyses throughout. Central to this framework is the interplay between opinion context and individual, reflecting the often fluid and complex relationship between aggregate and individual judgment. The specific findings that representations of public opinion can alter the distribution of opinion through assimilation, contrast, or reinforcement are emphasized and given context within the voting and public opinion literature.     

Ein Bericht von der Heimatfront

For a considerable period, the ISAF mission of the German army to Afghanistan has been opposed by a majority of German citizens. This discrepancy between elite decisions and public opinion suggests that the process of political representation does not work smoothly. This paper shows that political elites hardly engaged in political leadership concerning this issue. Moreover, voters did not give strong incentives for elite responsiveness by casting policy votes on the Afghanistan issue. Even in the 2009 election, the Afghanistan issue did not play a major role in voting choice. At the same time, public opinion appears to have affected elite decisions. Accordingly, the process of political representation appears to work more smoothly than suggested at a first glance.     

Taking official positions: How public policy preferences influence the platforms of parties in the United States

Do political parties in the United States respond to public opinion when writing their official party platforms? Current research suggests a clear linkage between public opinion and party positions, with parties responding to public preferences, and public opinion responding to party messages. Drawing on existing research regarding the saliency/issue competition model of party position-taking, this study examines the specific effect of public opinion on party positions, positing that when a larger percentage of the public views a particular issue area as important, political parties will discuss that issue area to a greater degree in their official election platforms. To test this theoretical construct, we rely on public opinion data collected by Gallup, and normalized by the Policy Agendas Project, from 1947 through 2011, combined with content analyzed data regarding both the Republican and Democratic platforms from 1948 through 2012. Using OLS regression with a Prais-Winsten transformation and panel-corrected standard errors, we find support for the hypothesis that political parties discuss, in their platforms, issue areas that the public views as more important. Further, we find that this responsiveness does not appear to vary across political parties. These findings have important implications for our understandings of both political party dynamics and party representation in the United States. Moreover, these findings allow us to assess the health of American democracy.     

Responsive Government? Public Opinion and Government Policy Preferences in Britain and Denmark

The ability of a political system to respond to the preferences of its citizens is central to democratic theory and practice; yet most empirical research on government responsiveness has concentrated on the United States. As a result, we know very little about the nature of government policy responsiveness in Europe and we have a poor understanding of the conditions that affect cross-national variations. This comparative study examines the relationship between public opinion and policy preferences in the United Kingdom and Denmark during the past three decades. We address two key questions: First, are the government's policy intentions driven by public opinion or vice versa? Second, do political institutions influence the level of government responsiveness? We suggest that public opinion tends to drive the government's policy intentions due to the threat of electoral sanction, and that this is more pronounced in proportional systems than in majoritarian democracies.     

Tactical Voting and Party Preferences: A Test of Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Studying the development of stable political attitudes, political scientists have argued that repeated voting for a political party reinforces initial party preferences, in a seemingly mechanistic process of habit-formation. However, the empirical evidence is scarce and the theoretical framework underdeveloped. Does the act of voting for a party improve an individual’s evaluation of this party? If so, is this effect simply due to habit-formation, or a more complex psychological mechanism? Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine the act of voting as a choice inducing dissonance reduction. We go beyond existing research, by focusing on tactical voters—a group for which the notion of habitual reinforcement does not predict an effect. The analyses reveal a positive effect of the act of voting tactically on the preferences for the parties voted for and may thus call for a revision of the traditional understanding of the role of voting in shaping party preferences.     

PUBLIC OPINION REACTION TO REPEATED EVENTS: Citizen Response to Multiple Supreme Court Abortion Decisions

While numerous works explores how single events or political actions affect public opinion, almost no research explores how this effect evolves with repeated actions. The Conditional Response Model holds that while elite actors can influence and polarize the public when they first act on an issue, subsequent action will not have this same effect. We challenge this model based on its depiction of psychological models of attitude formation and change. Instead of focusing on the number of times an actor has addressed an issue, we argue that the state of public opinion is the key to determining how the public will react to multiple elite actions over a long timeframe. We examine how the public reacted to multiple Supreme Court decisions on abortion. Our results suggest that the Conditional Response Model does a poor job of depicting public opinion and that actors are not limited in their influence by the number of previous actions on an issue.     

Expressions of Distrust: Third-Party Voting and Cynicism in Government

Voter distrust of the national government is an ongoing theoretical concern for scholars who study voting behavior in the United States. Previous research demonstrates that distrustful voters are less likely to vote for major party candidates than their more trusting counterparts. Using the American National Election Survey, we explore the relationship between citizen distrust and voting for three major third-party challengers (Wallace, Anderson, and Perot) and the use of trust levels as predictors of third- party voting. We find citizen trust levels are significant and strong predictors of third-party voting, independent of other common explanatory variables of vote choice. We also find trust levels are stable over time, and we find little evidence to support the argument that trust levels measure trust of incumbent political figures.     

Racial Inequality in Democratic Accountability: Evidence from Retrospective Voting in Local Elections

One important and, to date, overlooked component of democratic accountability is the extent to which it might exacerbate existing societal inequalities if the outcomes for some groups of citizens are prioritized over others when voters evaluate governmental performance. We analyze a decade of California school board elections and find evidence that voters reward or punish incumbent board members based on the achievement of white students in their district, whereas outcomes for African American and Hispanic students receive comparatively little attention. We then examine public opinion data on the racial education achievement gap and report results from an original list experiment of California school board members that finds approximately 40% of incumbents detect no electoral pressure to address poor academic outcomes among racial minority students. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for several scholarly literatures, including retrospective voting, racial inequality in political influence, intergovernmental policymaking, and education politics.     

Estimating the Effect of Elite Communications on Public Opinion Using Instrumental Variables

A central question in the study of democratic polities is the extent to which elite opinion about policy shapes public opinion. Estimating the impact of elites on mass opinion is difficult because of endogeneity, omitted variables, and measurement error. This article proposes an identification strategy for estimating the causal effect of elite messages on public support for European integration employing changes in political institutions as instrumental variables. We find that more negative elite messages about European integration do indeed decrease public support for Europe. Our analysis suggests that OLS estimates are biased, underestimating the magnitude of the effect of elite messages by 50%. We also find no evidence that this effect varies for more politically aware individuals, and our estimates are inconsistent with a mainstreaming effect in which political awareness increases support for Europe in those settings in which elites have a favorable consensus on the benefits of integration.     

Extreme right-wing voting in Western Europe

Abstract. In this study we explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour in the countries of the European Union and Norway from a micro and macro perspective. Using a multidisciplinary multilevel approach, we take into account individual-level social background characteristics and public opinion alongside country characteristics and characteristics of extreme right-wing parties themselves. By making use of large-scale survey data (N = 49,801) together with country-level statistics and expert survey data, we are able to explain extreme right-wing voting behaviour from this multilevel perspective. Our results show that cross-national differences in support of extreme right-wing parties are particularly due to differences in public opinion on immigration and democracy, the number of non-Western residents in a country and, above all, to party characteristics of the extreme right-wing parties themselves.     

Multiple meanings? The link between partisanship and definitions of voter fraud

Research on public perceptions of voter fraud often relies on items that gauge the frequency of noncitizen voting, double voting, and posing as someone else. Few studies explore the underlying sentiments that structure the concept of voter fraud and its meaning to people. Further, no study has examined whether these dominant survey items fully capture the ways in which people understand and articulate their views about voter fraud. We use original surveys with open-ended questions to explore public perceptions of voter fraud. With a combination of in-depth content analysis and text analysis, we find that individuals think of voter fraud as consisting of a wide array of actions being undertaken by a diverse set of actors. We also find substantial differences in the ways that Democrats and Republicans think about this issue. Our study provides important contributions to a growing literature on election administration and public opinion toward voter fraud.     

President Obama on the ballot: Referendum voting and racial spillover in the 2014 midterm elections

The 2014 elections were widely viewed as a referendum on the presidency of Barack Obama. Republicans ran against the incumbent president, and many view the Republican Party's victories in 2014 as a mass rejection of President Obama's policies. We argue that this account of the 2014 elections is incomplete. We advance the theory of racial spillover—that associating an attitude object with President Obama causes public opinion to polarize on the basis of racial attitudes—to explain both vote choice and referendum voting in the 2014 elections. In an analysis of the CCES and an original survey, we show that congressional vote choice was strongly racialized in 2014. We go on to show that perceptions of the election as a referendum on President Obama were also racialized, and that these perceptions mediated the link between racial animus and 2014 congressional vote choice. This represents the first study to show that racialized congressional evaluations continued into 2014 and we provide direct evidence that attitudes about President Obama mediated the effect of racial animus on congressional vote choice. We conclude by discussing the implications for referendum voting, racial spillover, and the 2014 midterm elections.     

Local racial context,campaign messaging,and public political behavior: A congressional campaign field experiment

Local racial contexts influence public opinion and voting behaviors. This paper argues that differences in community racial demographics also change public political behavior and influence the effectiveness of different campaign appeals to change public political behaviors of white Americans. Using data from an experiment run by a congressional primary campaign, I examine the responses of white Republicans to display a yard sign of a white Republican running against a Latino Republican. Consistent with theories of racial threat, whites in Latino neighborhoods were more likely to be willing to post yard signs. Moreover, the results also show that the effectiveness of different campaign appeals varies by neighborhood racial context. These findings show that racial diversity affects the public political behaviors of white Americans and, more importantly, changes the effectiveness of different campaign appeals.     

(De)Centralization and voter turnout: theory and evidence from German municipalities

A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple Downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision—and, in particular, the distribution of political and administrative competences across government levels—likewise affects voters’ turnout decisions by influencing the expected net benefit of voting. Empirically, we exploit the institutional variation across German municipalities to test this proposition, and find supportive evidence.